On IDEO’s Future of the Book

Years ago, I watched a short documentary piece highlighting IDEO. Since then, I have felt fascinated and inspired with their products, product design process, people, culture and even the way that a hipster employee pulley-mounted his commuter bicycle so that it conserved space in the office environment. I would love to work at IDEO. Silly me – I thought that IDEO was more focused on product development and product consulting. Now they are playing in the digital space as well.  So maybe there’s a chance for me yet!

With their Future of the Book project, IDEO has entered in to the tablet space with a fresh approach to books in an attempt to further define what makes the digital narrative experience. I applaud IDEO for their contribution on the future digital narrative experience.

What’s In a Name?

IDEO’s book experience consists of 3 angles, each represented by a person’s name: Nelson, Coupland, and Alice. The IDEO site says “meet Nelson, Coupland, and Alice,” thus giving an anthropomorphic privilege to each person of their digital narrative solution. I guess they had to give each of the parts a label – why not a name? There are many examples of giving technologies their own names, some human, so why change? I digress…

Let’s break apart the 3 tracks of IDEO’s Future of the Book:

Nelson attempts to provide readers with

  • a contextual layer on top of the main narrative (in this instance, they target non-fiction)
  • a well-rounded point of view
  • fact-checking, curated and policed (we hope) by a community of users
  • connected, relevant and related books on the same- or near-subject matter

Coupland attempts to provider readers with

  • a social network built in, based on colleagues
  • tips, suggestions on books based on colleagues’ ratings and feedback
  • an invisible, shared context of a classroom (in a very loose sense, readers connect with other readers with the ability to have discussions about what they’re reading)

Alice attempts to provide readers with

  • ways to re-imagine fiction
  • a non-linear “reading” experience
  • something that smells like, or could ripen into a ARG, Geocaching or other MMO

Sealed for Freshness

With the looming tablet stampede from major hardware providers, where are the software providers? Again, it’s nice to see concepts from design agencies. I look forward to seeing what the textual reading experience becomes. However, is this ergodic reading experience something completely new, or will it tumble and blend in the wake of the countless other experiments stirred by mash-up culture?

Choose Your Own Hermeneutic Circle Adventure

On his show, Brian Lehrer talks to two creators of the IDEO project. His opening remarks include, “Now that we are not confined to Gutenberg’s printed page… the digital era is providing all sorts of opportunities to re-imagine the traditional novel or textbook.” We have been [optionally] free from the barriers of the printed page for a long time now. Are we artificially elevating the importance of the tablet device? Perhaps it’s the mobility, ease of use, and touch interface. I get it. But what I may not understand is how this recycled contextual, hypertextual, ergodic, closer-to-the-reading layer represents something new.  Might we run in to the postmodernist conondrum of the hermeneutic circle? And who selects and curates the hypertextual layer placed on top of a digital book? If I write a book, do I get to choose what sorts of hypertext are placed on top of my non-hypertext work? Do I, as an author, even have the right to control it?

While the Nelson idea of fact-checking and resource-layering sounds promising, it may challenge a few key factors of what we think about when we think about the book. First, how does a contextual layer placed on top of a digital book affect the idea of authorship? I confess that I may be walking the same privilege tightrope of cinema’s auteur theory, but authors are, after all, the people responsible for harnessing ideas and placing them in to narrative. Next, if we place a hypertextual layer on top of a traditional novel, does that novel, in turn, change? Is the “reading” of that hypertextual-layered novel now some sort of other?  And how do we fact-check the fact-checkers? If a community checks the facts, how can we verify the well-roundedness and non-bias of the community?

The Social Hive

In his recent manifesto, Jaron Lanier discusses the trouble with the concept of hive mind. This theory includes group think: the idea that like-minded individuals in a network end up reinforcing narrow-mindedness and neglect from a larger worldview. While IDEO’s Coupland may mimic the shared context of the classroom by sharing colleague’s reading list, does this shared network feature end up narrowing a user’s worldview by the same network it has intended to create in the first place?

Concluding Thoughts

Regardless of your thoughts on the digital book experience, IDEO’s proposal represents yet another leap forward in the future of reading and experiencing a book. In the Brian Lehrer interview, IDEO states that they aren’t trying to squash the sense of reading a book. Instead, they’re trying to give this other reading, the ergodic, the hypertextual, a space and raise its awareness. We must consider the implications of creating new networks, and how the very structure of our networks defines who we are, what we read, and what our preferences are.

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